Call me Paris

Venue: Globe - “Everyone Should Have Fun with My Image” (Paris Hilton)

Los Angeles, 2004: Paris Hilton, multimillion-dollar heiress to the Hilton hotel empire, is making her meteoric rise from it girl to reality TV star. While Paris is currently being hailed as the inventor of the selfie, her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon has completely different pictures of the party girl to offer and is publishing her private sex tape under the name” 1 Night in Paris”. The film became the best-selling porn of the noughties. Paris tried in vain to sue for the rights to her painting.

At the same time in Bergisch Gladbach: Julia, a young teenage blonde girl, moves into town and is immediately nicknamed “Paris” due to her external resemblance to the American it girl at school. She soon finds herself in her own video shoot of “1 Night in Paris”. She puts off this night for a long time. Until she read in the memoirs by Paris Hilton in 2024 what the real Paris wrote about her sex tape: “It was as if I were being raped electronically. ”

In search of the right to her own image, she meets the man who abused her. There is an act of violence in a Hilton hotel room. Now the man is lying on the bed, face down. How could it come to this? Suddenly, the real Paris Hilton, Julia's mother and her girlfriends appear to Julia. Together, they try to unravel the threads: How did she become “Paris”? Where is their tape? And if she is nothing more than a copy of an original, then who is the girl who is on the tape? Who is the person behind the persona?

In the form of a memoir, Yana Eva Thönnes follows the two doppelgangers into the prism of traumatic memory and dissects the context in which these two true cases stand: The noughties as the last truly shamelessly misogynous decade in which the nationwide Internet is just spreading.

Yana Eva Thönnes is a director, author and performer. In 2015, she founded the performance group THE AGENCY together with Magdalena Emmerig, Rahel Spöhrer and Belle Santos. In autumn 2023, she staged “In Memory of Doris Bither” at the show stage studio. “Call me Paris” premiered at the Venice Biennale, 2025.